Sam Altman on opeanai non disparagement exit clause
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1) Altman's companies have had similar clauses before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40396787
2) The entire OpenAI board debacle started because Sam wanted Helen Toner removed from the board for publishing a paper he felt was disparaging to the company: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-the-battle-of-the-board
Sam’s current tweet is solely about whether vested equity could be clawed back as a penalty for refusing to agree to a non disparagement in connection with a separation if you don’t agree to non disparagement and a release of claims. That is well outside the norms.
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-rules-th... (“Board Rules that Employers May Not Offer Severance Agreements Requiring Employees to Broadly Waive Labor Law Rights”)
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/27/labor-board-says-non-dispar... (“Labor Board says non-disparagement clauses are unlawful — here’s what that means”)
We likely see what a just world looks like differently, and that’s fine. If someone has to pay you to be quiet when you leave, they have something material to hide worth pursing.
If you feel like sharing examples of the carve outs you mentioned, please do so I can communicate them to regulators for further triage and actioning.
I also think you are frankly getting caught in black and white thinking. Yes, some companies abuse things like non-disparagement clauses, but they can also be used in a perfectly fine manner.
The carve outs typically say something like “you agree to not disparage the Company, provided nothing herein prohibits you from speaking out about workplace harassment, conduct prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act, or [other speech/laws that local law might say you can’t restrict].”
Terminations are emotionally fraught. People’s egos get hurt and it becomes contentious. A company might want to pay you 3 months severance to end on good terms and avoid a larger dispute, but have it be contingent on a release of claims and non disparagement clause. That does not mean it’s because they “have something to hide”.
For example, these clauses are often mutual. Does the terminated executive have something to hide?
I agree that coercively using NDAs and non-disparagement clauses to hide illegal conduct (harassment, labor law violations) is probably illegal and immoral.
But should OpenAI and Ilya be allowed to agree to a mutual non-disparagement, where both wish each other well, instead of having Sam post publicly about how Ilya is a backstabbing disloyal person that can’t be trusted, and Ilya posting about how Sam is a maniacal power hungry awful boss? These are personality conflicts and workplace disagreements, not illegal conduct.
My political views are, broadly speaking, “be a decent human, defend and empower other humans”. Understandably, what that means is potentially up for interpretation.
My character assessment of Altman was inaccurate, and my comments speak to a posture needed as a counterparty of his or an org he has a control of.
> there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication.
Mind you, Altman could still be lying and that would be very much in character, but this also sounds like a very plausible explanation for the hubbub.
This was in something you were asked to sign when exiting the company, and I can very much imagine that it was something HR or legal thought was a good idea to add in a kind of "better safe than sorry" way, and that the CEO wasn't aware of.
I'm not saying it's necessarily true -- but I do think it falls in the realm of believability.
* For the data sources, we know there's a lot of CSAM in there, and that OpenAI knowingly shipped this data to 3rd party companies to tag it. Time ran an article about their Kenyan parters, who quit on them because "Look at this image. If the image is CSAM, push the button" is a horrifying job.
* There's copyright. AI relies extensively on hiding the true scale of the copyright problem by filtering infringing content out of the AI responses. But the engineers of those systems know the dirty details. (It's dubious that such filtering would bring them back into compliance with fair use; LLMs are paraphrasing machines and copyright filters do not cope well with paraphrasing)
* Discrimination is a shitshow. LLMs discriminate as their dataset isn't reflective of reality, but of what and how we choose to record reality. And as Google's "Diverse Nazis" image generation shows, messing with prompts doesn't work to fix this. It'll be discrimination lawsuits either way. All major AI firms know of this problem, and internally investigate it to avoid gaffes like Google's.
In practice, the boring answer to the question is "all of the above and then some". A big problem for OpenAI is that these are massive problems, for which their engineers could be dragged into a courtroom to testify about.
Glad to see an offer to fix it for former employees. Although it's not clear what form that fix would take. If people signed a perpetual non-disparagement clause because they believed their vested equity was under threat, the correct fix would be to void the non-disparagement clause. And even asking for a perpetual non-disparagement agreement in the first place is gross to me, unless it comes with perpetual severance pay. I just re-checked my exit paperwork from Google and Meta and Microsoft and I didn't see anything like that. I don't think that Sam is apologizing for that specifically. He seems to be apologizing about the equity part only. I'd be happy to see clarification here.
Unfortunately I think apologies are not usually the right PR move, because the mob generally doesn't accept them, but as the person who posted the top thread on the previous post, I'm glad that he did apologize despite that.
I thought we were talking about exit docs, not clauses in the equity program. Do we have any reason to believe that the equity program itself contained language to this effect? The Vox article only talks about the NDA employees sign on the way out, it's only random internet comments that I've seen speculating about the contents of the equity program.
Yeah, it's one of those "are you an asshole or just incompetent?" PR moments. Altman seems to have chosen "incompetent" but neither is a great look for a CEO.
From community darlings to a quickly cratering reputation.
> i did not know this was happening and i should have.
> the team was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so.
The cherry on top? He's cry-typing it like a tumblr apology. Just pathetic.
1. Explain how it happened, since he 100% knew. What CEO does not know how his company's equity is distributed and under what terms?
2. Explain how it will be fixed, in detail.
3. Proactively reach out to all those affected, as per step 2.
4. Resign.
5. Reconsider his life and how he handles feedback, since he has had issue with criticism before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40396787
2. 3. Presumably the company is working on that, and this tweet is the first step? This has become pretty public by now anyways.
4. Have you resigned from every job you've ever had if you made a mistake? If you wrote a design document with a single mistaken requirement? This one clause was one miniscule aspect of running the company out of hundreds of thousands. Demanding resignation is massively disproportionate here.
5. "Reconsider your life" is outside the scope of this.
So it could well have just been part of the template that their legal team likely started with.
That is an extraordinary clause, which is evident by the wide, stunned reaction and the CEOs rapid backpedaling as it becomes public knowledge.
First, when the original saga happened and now when people leave OpenAI, apparently with a non-disparagement / NDA clause in their severance agreement.
Such an agreement seems very standard[1], and I don’t understand why this is so scandalous.
[1] Edit to add: I have seen several such agreements on both sides, so this is from personal experience
A few questions:
* Is such a non-disparagement clause that claws back your earned compensation legally enforceable, or does it have any legal basis (at least in the state of California)?
* Are non-disclosure agreements enforceable post-employment if you're claiming to be a whistleblower unofficially, i.e. you just go to twitter and rant about your ex-employer?
I am sure some calls were received because why come out and apologize for it.
I wonder what will actually be discussed when impacted employees talk in private with Sam (or whatever subordinate he delegates this to).
I wouldn’t be surprised if former employees are ambushed during the private meeting.
We called this out and HR was like “it was some template, let me see if I can get it changed” and we went from there.
I dunno if nonsense like that happens at a bigger company like OpenAI but I wouldn’t rule it out, nor would I rule out a CEO not knowing about every detail that HR comes up with.